Katie Ford

[from Katie Ford's Deposition, Graywolf, 2002]

When the Trees Are Gone

Fire in the trees splits them
open like body bags. They heap
into piles, tips pointing to the blue mountains bruising
the edge of the valley, pointing to the river just
before it runs into the walled arc of the dam, to where I know
water that far off is useless.

1. What does its task to the trees is true.
2. What pulses so you can make out a body is true.

Fire in the trees splits them open,
the pine-splints clean and stripped downwards
like a photograph of something caught
falling. Is it fire, is it wood
that makes the sound of the mussel I cracked off a rock yesterday?
Only a half-body away, my hand on the rock, wrenching
an armor of white off the stone haystack.

3. A crack and then again a crack of heat, of pine, of a bag opened, of the shell.
4. What makes a sound is true.
5. In me the sound of something repeatedly done to another thing.

Fire in the trees splits them.
I took the shells from the rock, quickly as if the tide
were coming in. My arms were full because of what I did.

6. The tide was out. The tide was out.
7. The sky becomes larger, more true, becomes the shape of the body it lost, hollows everythere.

What will I have to say to the man who tells me,
when we watch the ashes cool acre by acre, the fire
having consumed each arrow-pine standing and fallen,

It was like this the evening my wife died. She filled the whole bed.
I would turn to her, then remember she
was wrapped in a blanket in the front hall. There was no
arch in her spine. The blanket had smoothed over each edge
and curve of her face like a leaf enclosing its knotted buds.
I turned to her again and again until morning, when they came to take
her away. Just wait. Tomorrow
when you wake up, you will see the trees
where they used to be.

Deposition: Poems

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky

Try praise, today's proposal from the Kenyon Review blog.

Sarah Lindsay

In the current issue of Poetry," Tell the Bees" from Sarah Lindsay's Twigs and Knucklebones, Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

if: the future of books

If you haven't already, start reading if: book. Dan Piepenbring's cogent remarks on high school yearbooks vs Facebook.

reading in Asheville, NC

Sunday, October 5th at 3 PM I'll be reading for the Poetrio series at Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, NC.

Martha Graham via Russell Freedman

[from Russell Freedman's Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life, Clarion Books, 1998]

According to Agnes de Mille: "I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. ... I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly,"

" 'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.' "

Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life

Oni Buchanan

[from Oni Buchanan's prize-winning Spring from The University of Illinois Press, 2008]

The Sleepers

And in the dimness of the corridor, a waking person steps
soundlessly through the rows of unseen sleepers, each
in his individual box behind a wall.

Another treads elsewhere, a parallel corridor, a carpet
of deep maroon absorbing the weight of the step,
the sound of the step, as if no one —

The gray wears a gray scarf, knitted, about its throat,
or seeps from itself, evaporating into gray, a mist, heapings of
     insulation, the itch
of material, gray swathe, stiff canvas of filament — and above,
outside the hallways (rectangular prisms of gray) (two telescopes of
     gray capped on either end):
the dull stars stuck over the earth like buttons in a dust upholstery.

And sing soft to one another, and the bodies follow from offstage,
from behind the heavy plush, where the ropes are held and the hands
     dressed in black
flit between the long, thin planes of scenery —

On the path we saw a tanager like an orange handkerchief pulled
     through the leaves.
There is always that distant tremolo in the air that rises from the
     green,
from the graves in the dell,
and the kingfisher diving over the membrane of pond.

And above all the tangle (the matted earth, the root hairs and
     vascular
bundles, the barky breachings of gnarl, the bullfrogs and the
     gnat-clouds,
the squirrels growing fatter, and then the panoplies of
     leaves-on-leaves
like a game of stacking hands, or canopies

where the branches arch in ribs) above:
the spots of chimney sparrows flitting like eye motes over the white
     of the sky.
The rattle of the sparrows like a handful of dice
or dried beans thrown into a toy drum

(the sound of the rattle like a hemisphere of straight pins
radiating from their cushion, the pin heads balancing each
its million spots of light, allotted, while beneath
and down to the sharpened tip, the long metal shafts
vibrate invisibly: sleep.

Sleep. Sleep. Your separate sleeps — )

Spring (National Poetry Series)

Katie Ford

[from Katie Ford's Colosseum, Graywolf Press, 2008]

Division

We drove through Wyoming passing people on horseback, noon horse shadows like those of caskets lifted up, the dead sitting up through pine boxes, looking at the strange reins in their hands. Once we were in the mountains we saw no animals, no birds. Green signs beside the granite rocks dated them back to the Triassic Age, Mississippian. On the opposing hill, the trail the goats wore down coming to water curved like a strand of hair, a single hair, unmassed. You said stop the car. Look at that, you said, pointing at the strips of ice-age rock, settling. A mountain range is simply a crease in the land is how it was taught to me. A crease is the foresight of division, you were taught. Desperate for communion, Catherine of Siena was beside herself in hills like these, eating nothing but an herb she would suck on and spit out. She scalded herself at the baths, ran away to a cave, shoved twigs into her mouth so that when the host traveled down her raw throat she would indeed feel something, even a god breaking inside her. Would you look at that, you said again near the rail of the viewpoint, where the historical marker explained the plates underneath. Beneath it, a crow's wing. Lord of confusion, Lord of great slaughter and thin birds, you could never answer all of us at once. Layer by layer I imagined pulling it apart to find the upholding musculature beneath the soot and grease of flight. Finding none — just the spinelike axis and its branching barbs, minute hooks holding them together — we continued on to the hotel parking lot in Sheridan, where at night someone scraped a key or a knife alongside the car while we slept off what we could. It was hard to tell what was used. There was nowhere to fix it. There was no talk of ever fixing it.

Colosseum: Poems

Oni Buchanan

Oni Buchanan's "maroon canoe" from Spring on Poetry Daily and her "Text Message" from Drunken Boat

Alysha Wood

[excerpt from Alysha Wood's "how to peel in seven lessons" from TinFish 18, TinFish Press, 2008]

Lesson ๔

Approach:

Gaw kept. Gaw kept containing. Gaw kept containers to reuse. Once something was empty she rinsed it out and saved it to hold something else. This was a kind of security. A kind of pack-rat-ness. A kind of hoarding. A kind of preparation. These small bits of condensing. Reusing. Small woven places.

Execution:

It was her habit to pour her child into old containers. Old tin cans of soybeans. Plastic bowls. She poured her child into such and such a container until it became obvious that the child would not fit. She would add this sweet into another, larger container and go on with her kitchen. Stow her in a box or in a pantry for later use. She might forget, and there when she opened the door would be her daughter, spilled about the ledges, busting open in the lip, neck cramped up all in corners.

Gaw liked things of her own tidy. She swept with one broom, cut with one knife, scrubbed with one towel. The shelves were cleaned, the mess poured into a glass jar. It was strange to Gaw that her daughter had accumulated more than before, that the sum of her parts no longer added up to 60 g, net weight 2.12 oz.

Result:

Gaw took careful pains to lose weight, to fill things up to the brim, to save space. This was about economy, and she had learned this when she crossed water all those eons ago. It was a question of what could be carried. She knew she could not take any thing with her and somehow this translated to saving space. To holding as little as possible at one time.

subscribe to TinFish

Reginald Shepherd

[from Itinerary, GreenTower Press, 2006]

Hesitation Theory

I drift into the sound of wind,
how small my life must be
to fit into his palm like that, holly
leaf, bluejay feather, milkweed fluff,
pine straw or sycamore pod, resembling
scraps of light. The world
slips through these fingers
so easily, there's so much
to miss: the sociable bones
linked up in supple rows, mineral
seams just under the skin. I hold
my palm against the sun and don't see
palm or sun, don't hold anything
in either hand. I look up, look
away (what's what?), I trip
and stumble (fall
again), find myself face down
in duff, a foam of fallen live oak
leaves, with only
this life, mine at times.

GreenTower Press

Evie Shockley

[from Evie Shockley's a half-red sea, Carolina Wren Press, 2006]

you must walk this lonesome

say hello to moon leads you into trees as thick as folk on easter pews dark but venture through amazing was blind but now fireflies glittering dangling from evergreens like christmas oracles soon you meet the riverbank down by the riverside water bapteases your feet moon bursts back in low yellow swing low sweet chariot of cheese shines on in the river cup hands and sip what never saw inside a peace be still mix in your tears moon distills distress like yours so nobody knows the trouble it causes pull up a log and sit until your empty is full your straight is wool your death is yule moonshine will do that barter with you what you got for what you need draw from the river like it is well with my soul o moon you croon and home you go

a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series)

Susan Stewart

[from Susan Stewart's Red Rover, University of Chicago Press, 2008]

Wrens

their tumbling joy
decanted descanting
over cobble
stones in and out
of firethorn back
and forth to gingko
who knows
who will
ever know
what net
binds them
loosening
song?
I would not
lose them
could not lose
them know
if there's
another
place another
world another life
there must be wrens.

Red Rover (Phoenix Poets Series)


[from "Apple" from Columbarium, University of Chicago Press, 2003]

. . .

If you wait for the apple, you wait
for one ripe moment. And should
you sleep, or should you dream, or
should you stare too hard in the daylight
or come into the dark to see

what can't be seen, you will drop
from the edge, going over into
coarse, or rot, or damping off.
You will wake to yourself, regretful,
in a grove of papery leaves.

Columbarium (Phoenix Poets Series)

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's A Metaphorical God, 2008]

Sweet Incendiary

In this hot light, the seraphim

might look like anything: juniper
flounced in wind, flashing spoil
of jasper, the dove that flies,

anything with a little
shimmer to it, and some
allegorical precedent.

O for an obvious angel,
face of flame and flaming wings,
and golden dart enflamed to thrust

my breast and thrusting pierce again,
my breast like honey melting
with delicious wounds. Or rather leave

these Golden-age extremities:
give me a shotgun angel
to shuck me in the back

of his chariot and break
for the state line, shack up, rip
the veil and show me the shining

undeniable face of God.
No such luck. No glorious
gristle for my fancies

but what I bring myself. — See
my jerry-built epiphany?
Car battery wired to my tongue

set to switch-on my own shimmer,
the spark like a burning coal,
like honey for sweetness

as I mouth the hallmark motto
of heatstruck martyrs: Lord
let me suffer or let me die.

A Metaphorical God: Poems

James Merrill

[from James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation,” from Collected Poems, 2001]

. . .

Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed
To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties,
Something tells me that one piece contrived
To stay in the boy’s pocket. How do I know?
I know because so many later puzzles
Had missing pieces — Maggie Teyte’s high notes
Gone at the war’s end, end of the vogue for collies,
A house torn down; and hadn’t Mademoiselle
Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well?
I’ve spent the last days, furthermore,
Ransacking Athens for that translation of “Palme.”
Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library
Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can’t
Just be imagining. I’ve seen it. Know
How much of the sun-ripe original
Felicity Rilke made himself forgo
(Who loved French words — verger, mûr, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
Know already in that tongue of his
What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza’s symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.
The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots
Above the open vowel. And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.

Collected Poems

Li-Young Lee

[from Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes, 2008]

After the Pyre

It turns out, what keeps you alive
as a child at mid-century
following your parents from burning
village to cities on fire to a country at war
with itself and anyone
who looks like you,

what allows you to pass through smoke,
through armed mobs singing the merits of a new regime, tooth for a
     tooth,
liberation by purification, and global
dissemination of the love of jealous gods,
coup d'etat, coup de grace, and the cooing of mothers
and doves and screaming men
and children caught in the pyre's updraft,

what keeps you safe even among your own,
the numb, the haunted, the maimed, the barely alive,

tricks you learned to become invisible,
escapes you perfected, playing dead, playing
stupid, playing blind, deaf, weak, strong,
playing girl, playing boy, playing native, foreign,
in love, out of love, playing crazy, sane, holy, debauched,

playing scared, playing brave, happy, sad, asleep, awake,
playing interested, playing bored, playing broken,
playing "Fine, I'm just fine," it turns out,

now that you're older
at the beginning of a new century,
what kept you alive
all those years keeps you from living.

Behind My Eyes: Poems (with audio CD)

Susan Howe

[from Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007]

Now faith is not what we
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing

Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape


Reason throws light open
Who is that phantom in
the foreground after you

Don’t be afraid — free as air
Light presupposes open
Distant if a foe not you

. . .

I keep you here to keep
your promise all that you
think I’ve wrought what

I see or do in the twilight
of time but keep forgetting
you keep coming back

. . .

Longing and envying rest
after a little — garden under
trees but better still likely

to be still more anxious to
get to just daylight all I’ve
always pushed backward

Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions Paperbook)

Mary Jo Bang

[from Mary Jo Bang's Elegy, 2007]

"In Order" Means Neat and Not Next

Night was next. At some point
On the train the outside dissolved
And she was sitting next to herself in a seat.
In a two-tone gray and blue vinyl seat
With hints of a previous sitter. The dim other
She'd tried so hard to revive but failed
Was staring back at her

Through grit and dirt glass.
These are my footprints, she thought
Looking at her feet, Mary Jo's in Mary Janes.
Made of parts, they nullified the notion of total
Wholeness. The absurd road was obliterated
And all of the moment was inside.
The body buried in time.

Time, a fickle list of numbers.
Sleep was the utopian fantasy
She wished she could fall into.
Eye to the window, to fate.
Feeling but not seeing. Out there was absence
And presence. Out there was a row
Of everything she remembered.

Elegy: Poems

Mark Jarman

[from Mark Jarman's Epistles, 2007]

11. One wants, the other wants

. . .

One wants to be singled out.

The way a knife will not fully separate a shaft of green onion or stalk of celery it has chopped, that is how one remains attached. The way blinding tears come, mincing yellow onions, that is how knowledge of others blurs. The tedious unpeeling of garlic cloves, especially the finicky thin ones near the heart of the bulb, with purple highlights running through the wrapping and skin, that is how the many inhere, clustered.

But one wants to be singled out, unsheathed from the smother of community, a slim, spiralform, marble word.

That word is your name.

There is in each of us an agent that refuses to die. It makes us, it is driven to form us, and has no idea who we are. Zapped by the ultimate fire blast, it will shift shape and endure. Lodged eventually in a crevice of the dead planet, it will wait millennia for rain.

One loves another, one loves himself. One strides through the color wheel naked with arms outstretched, one crouches drawing diagrams on the bottom of the ocean floor. One worries that his heart is going off, like a week-old carton of milk. One that love is leaking away through some hairfine crack.

. . .

Epistles: Poems

Hakalau Sunrise

 

Hakalau Sunrise

 

James Merrill

[from James Merrill's From the First Nine: 1946-1976, 1981]

The Mad Scene

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.
In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share,
The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever
Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly,
Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper
Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched
From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes
Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never
Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers
And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna,
Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust,
Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen.
Fingers were running in panic over the flute's nine gates.
Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed
To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one
Topmost mordent of wisteria,
As the lean tree burst into grief.

From the First Nine. Poems 1946-1976

James Merrill

[from James Merrill's Collected Prose]

unless there's a story, of what conceivable interest is a tone of voice?

. . .

It can take me dozens of drafts to get something right, which often turns out to be a perfect commonplace. What joy when it works -- like fighting one's way through cobwebs to an open window. I don't mean that the more work you put into something, the better it turns out. Often you can feel the life ebbing away at the hands of a Mad Embalmer.

Collected Prose

Jorie Graham

[from Jorie Graham's Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, 1980]

Girl at the Piano

It begins, what I can hear, with the train withdrawing from itself
at an even pace in the night although it always seems
to withdraw from us.
Our house almost continues

in its neighbors, although the thinnest bent and wavering fence
keeps us completely strange.
Perhaps it is a daughter who practices the piano, practices
slow and overstressed like the train, slow and relentless

like the crickets weaving their briar between us and growing
       increasingly
unsure of purpose. These three sounds continue, and I
alongside them so that we seem to stand
terribly still. Every change

is into a new childhood, what grows old only the fiber
of remembering, tight at first like crickets and ivories,
crickets and train,
then slackening

though always hanging on to the good bones of windowframes and eaves
and white columns of the porch
in moonlight. Like taffeta, the song,
though not yet learned, is closer to inhabiting her hands

and less her mind, ever closer to believing
it could never have been otherwise. Your sleep beside me is the real,
the loom I can return to when all loosens into speculation.
Silently, the air is woven

by the terribly important shuttle of your breath,
       the air that has crossed
your body retreating, the new air approaching. See,
transformation, or our love of it,
draws a pattern we can't see but own. Like the pennies we pushed

into the soil beneath the pillowy hydrangea, pennies
that will turn the white flowers blue,
or the song I finish past her, the completely learned song
like my other self, a penny slipped next to the heart, a neighbor.

Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's A Metaphorical God, 2008]

Jubilee, featured today on Verse Daily

A Metaphorical God: Poems

William Carlos Williams

[from William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1918]

II.3.

When you hang your clothes on the line you do not expect to see the line broken and them trailing in the mud. Nor would you expect to keep your hands clean by putting them in a dirty pocket. However and of course if you are a market man, fish, cheeses and the like going under your fingers every minute in the hour you would not leave off the business and expect to handle a basket of fine laces without at least mopping yourself on a towel, soiled as it may be. Then how will you expect a fine trickle of words to follow you through the intimacies of this dance without — oh, come let us walk together into the air awhile first. One must be watchman to much secret arrogance before his ways are tuned to these measures. You see there is a dip of the ground between us. You think you can leap up from your gross caresses of these creatures and at a gesture fling it all off and step out in silver to my finger tips. Ah, it is not that I do not wait for you, always! But my sweet fellow — you have broken yourself without purpose, you are — Hark! it is the music! Whence does it come? What! Out of the ground? Is it this that you have been preparing fro me? Ha, goodbye, I have a rendezvous in the tips of three birch sisters. Encouragez vox musiciens! Ask them to play faster. I will return — later. Ah you are kind. — and I? must dance with the wind, make my own snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fugue! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.

III.3.

What can it mean to you that a child wears pretty clothes and speaks three languages or that its mother goes to the best shops? It means: July has good need of his blazing sun. But if you pick one berry from the ash tree I'd not know it again for the same no matter how the rain washed. Make my bed of witchhazel twigs, said the old man, since they bloom on the brink of winter.

X.3.

Truth's a wonder. What difference is it how the best head we have greets his first born these days? What weight has it that the bravest hair of all's gone waiting on cheap tables or the most garrulous lives lonely by a bad neighbor and has her south windows pestered with caterpillars? The nights are long for lice combing or moon dodging — and the net comes in empty again. Or there's been no fish in this fiord since Christian was a baby. Yet     up surges the good zest and the game's on. Follow at my heels, there's little to tell you you'd think a stoopsworth. You'd pick the same faces in a crowd no matter what I'd say. And you'd be right too. The path's not yours till you've gone it alone a time. But here's another handful of west wind. White of the night! White of the night. Turn back till I tell you a puzzle: What is it in the stilled face of an old mender man and winter not far off and a darky parts his wool, and wenches wear of a Sunday? It's a sparrow with a crumb in his beak dodging wheels and clouds crossing two ways.

Imaginations (A New Directions Paperbook)

Ellen Bryant Voigt

[from Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, 2007]

Redbud

Everywhere, like grass, toadflax, yellow coils
           a girl’s pincurls. Overhead,
the purely ornamental fruits, whites and pinks

thick on the bough. And straight ahead, along the path,
           spice viburnum, exotic shrub
named for the smell its clustered flowers held — nutmeg —

that made St. Louis tropical. We walked a lush,
           vast, groomed preserve — preserve in the sense
meant by self-indulgent kings, and in the sense

meant by science: every bloom and bine and bole,
           each independent green was labeled,
that was what we loved. And at the center, bronzed:

Linnaeus, master of design, whose art it was
           to shepherd any living thing
into its proper pasture. There, foamflower. There,

lungwort, vernacular “Spilled Milk,” leaf splashed with white,
           a graceful pulmonaria
in the language of greatest clarity which classifies

lilies and roses, rows of lilac. And here, at our feet,
           shade-drunk dark herb: wormwood, our word
for bitterness: an Artemesia, The Hunter,

goddess made incarnate on the ground, in whose name
           the avid mortal watching her
was torn apart. Where was his name? Where was his flower?

A cloud paused in the spring sky, and there came to us then,
           on the path, another blossoming.
Radiant in mauve, head to toe, back braced

as though to balance the weight of full breasts, one hand,
           gloved, lifted, unthinking to pet
the back of the hair, the hair itself a lacquered helmet.

And what should we make of her height, her heft, the size of the
    feet,
           the gruff swagger in the gait:
we stared outright — it seemed all right to stare, like

Linnaeus, who’d ranked the stones, and sorted the plants by how
           they propagate and colonized
whatever crawls and swims and flies and bears live young?

Light by which I’ve lived, the wish to name, to know,
           the work of it, the cost of it —
if only I could be, or want to be, more like

that boy: ignorant, stunned, human.
                                                     “Acteon,” you said,
           by his own hounds torn asunder. And so
the brief shadow flickered and dissolved: the world

was ours again, the world like this, made less confused.
           And we strolled like kings back down the path,
past a redbud tree in plush white bloom.

Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006

Jorie Graham

[from Jorie Graham's Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, 1980]

Tennessee June

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in . . .
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh

let it touch you . . .
The porch is sharply lit — little box of the body —
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming —
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.

Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Peter Matthiessen

[from Peter Matthiessen's Bone by Bone, 1999]

The habitual killer who is not a professional -- not a lawman, say, or an outlaw or a soldier -- must account for himself to his community and church and state. The fear that otherwise he might be banished was why Cox made excuses for his killings, why it was always someone's fault, why he could never accept responsibility for what he'd done. He had been banished long ago, of course, but did not know it yet.

Anyway, those men agreed that the first killing was the hard one. That was true even for Cox, and it was true for me. The next one comes easier, and after that there is nothing much to stop a man from the third and fourth and fifth. It is too late to go back so one may as well go forward, though the track goes nowhere, like a track into the Glades, dying out at last in the sea of grass. Out there, there is no destination, only a great emptiness, a great silence like the south wind in the grasses.

I wondered what Les might have become if circumstances had been different, if nothing had triggered him, laid bare that streak in him, if he had never killed that first time with Sam Tolen. Perhaps he would have gone on pitching, gone off to the major leagues and found the notoriety he needed, throwing beanballs when he felt an urge to hurt. Or perhaps that instinct toward murder would have sprouted anyway, like certain lunacies.

For most men of criminal persuasion, notoriety is crucial, with ill fame far better than no fame at all. Ill fame is a kind of honor that replaces traditional honor in certain circumstances. When we were in Duval County jail, a reference in the newspaper to "the handsome young murder suspect Leslie Cox" was the only detail Les gave a damn about. He would snatch that paper right out of your hand to see his name in type, read it over and over, as if that black ink in a public record restored his confidence in his own existence. That utter lack of knowledge of himself made him unpredictable in everything he did, like a rabid dog which has left behind the known traits of its kind to become a strange lone creature.

Bone by Bone

Medbh McGuckian

[from Medbh McGuckian's The Book of the Angel, 2004]

Rose Shoes

Different from every neighbour,
the mountain tries to enter the house
like the element in which the world swims.

Should we call this otherwise a creature,
showing its wear, its sojourn in the deep
yellow shadows the woman presses to her breast?

It is cored out, its shell of shadow,
which we have dared to call glory,
and brightly lit shoulder, outside of sleep,

a sky-blue gospel. The house turns
to control the seasons, part of the house
detains the falling evidence of light

and its daydreams; where my deepest
thought, which carries all thought,
falls through like a devotion.

Already the ignition of the skin
that he troubles and holds, touching
but not touching, is a desire that withdraws

from its satisfaction, from electricity's
unnerving ways . . . not absolutely unseen
but missed by sight, whose imperfect,

perfectible, high-speed, machine-eye
could not explain the feast he desired
of the absolute repose of the earth.

The Book of the Angel

Susan Stewart

[from Susan Stewart's The Hive, 1987]

Mother's Day

    If your mother is alive, wear
    a red carnation; otherwise, wear
    a white one to be banquet.
    -- Mother's Day program, 1962

This was the black day in the house of straw,
The frail house built by the north-gone swallows.
All morning they beat sideways against the windows, hollowing
An old ache out of ice and putty, then the slow thaw
Of daylight on the spattered panes. What calls
Them to that spent light must be desire, and desire's own callow
Reflection: the lost wing, the fire gone out, the tallow
Hardening. This, love, is the nest that falls

In the back of the mind forever, where a mother
Is still alive, a song's not quite forgotten, and so turns
Back slowly in strings and twigs. I need a mended curtain,
A battered red carnation, a certain
Accompaniment to the end of winter as this high sun burns
On the glass, the white blanket; an extra wing, a tuck or gather.

The Hive: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press).)

Gertrude Stein

[from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, 1914]

A Red Hat

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstros because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

Tender Buttons

Eavan Boland

[from Eavan Boland's New Collected Poems, 2008]

Midnight Flowers

I go down step by step.
The house is quiet, full of trapped heat and sleep.
In the kitchen everything is still.
Nothing is distinct; there is no moon to speak of.

I could be undone every single day by
paradox or what they call in the countryside
blackthorn winter,
when hailstones come with the first apple blossom.

I turn a switch and the garden grows.
A whole summer's work in one instant!
I press my face to the glass. I can see
shadows of lilac, of fuchsia; a dark likeness of blackcurrant:

little clients of suddenness, how sullen they are at
the margins of the light.
They need no rain, they have no roots.
I reach out a hand; they are gone.

When I was a child a snapdragon was
held an inch from my face. Look, a voice said, this
is the colour of your hair. And there it was, my head,
a pliant jewel in the hands of someone else.

New Collected Poems

Rabia the Mystic

[from Rabia the Mystic as translated by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone in Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women Around the World from Ancient Sumeria to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone, 1999]

You are the companion of my heart

You are the companion of my heart
Though my body I offer to those who desire it.

My body is friendly to guests

But you the companion of my heart
Are the guest of my soul.

Voices of Light

John Rybicki

[from John Rybicki's We Bed Down into Water, 2008]

Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider

Once a spider lived under her arm and
so she never shaved. She let her hair
grow gnarl for that spider to nest in.
She'd slipper step the wet grass night
with her wet grass feet and hold a bare
lightbulb up under her hairy arm
with the hairy spider living inside it.
She'd keep that one arm raised until
fat moths and June bugs and beetles
and swarms of mosquitoes tangled in her
armpit, trembling and pinned down,
exhausting themselves until the spider
slipped from warm cave top
to sting those moths and beetle
bugs and June bugs and mosquitoes,
sting them over and over with that
one kiss I could not live without.

We Bed Down into Water: Poems (Triquarterly Books)

Scott M. Silsbe interviews John Rybicki on nidus.

Per Petterson

[from Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, translated by Anne Born, 2007]

. . . alongside the cabin wall there was a big patch of stinging nettles, growing tall and thick, and I worked my way around them in a wide arc, and then my father came round the house and stood looking at me. He held his head aslant and rubbed his chin, and I straightened up and waited to hear what he would say.

"Why not cut down the nettles?" he said.

I looked down at the short scythe handle and across at the tall nettles.

"It will hurt," I said. Then he looked at me with half a smile and a little shake of his head.

"You decide for yourself when it will hurt," he said, suddenly getting serious. He walked over to the nettles and took hold of the smarting plants with his bare hands and began to pull them up with perfect calm . . .

The sun was high in the sky now, it was hot under the trees, it smelt hot, and from everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hawk and a hare's last sigh, and the tiny muffled boom each time a bee hit a flower. I heard the ants crawling in the heather, and the path we followed rose with the hillside; I took deep breaths through my nose and thought that no matter how life should turn out and however far I travelled I would always remember this place as it was just now, and miss it.

Out Stealing Horses: A Novel

A. R. Ammons

[from A. R. Ammons's Collected Poems: 1951-1971, 1972]

excerpt from "Essay on Poetics"

. . . I like the order that allows, say, when
a thousand cows are on a thousand acres,
clusters to flow out in single file down a gully,

encirclings of drink holes, concentrations in a green
bottom, spread-outs, but identifiable, across
a broad rise or scape: I like that just as I

like tracings converging into major paths,
untracings of widening out beyond a clump of
trees or small pass:

those configurations, rendered by aerial photography,
would interest me endlessly
in the precision of their topographical relations:

the interests of cows and the possibilities of
the landscape could be read (not a single actual cow)
there well: and nothing be as a consequence known and

yet everything in a sense known, the widest paths
the controlling symbols, with lesser resemblances of
motion: after a while I could account for the motions of

the whole herd and make interesting statements:
for example, with experience, I bet I could tell
from the wear under a copse

whether a lot of hot sunny days in a year
or windy days come: I could tell something obvious already
from the copse whether it constitutes a meaningful

windbreak in a cold wind, sand or snow storm, and then
that, though obvious, would tell about cows:
I'll bet in warm climates with heavy, maybe daily, rains

there'd be little wear under trees, for the cows
would enjoy being out in the showers:
anyway, there's a time when loose speech has to give in,

come up to the corral, run through the planked alleys,
accept the brand, the medication, surrender to the
identity of age, sex, weight, and bear its relationship

to the market: there's no market for most speech, specially
good, and none for loose: that's why I don't care
how far I wander off;

I wouldn't care if I found a whole year gone by and myself
not called for: the way I think is
I think what I see: the designs are there: I use

words to draw them out -- also because I can't
draw at all: I don't think: I see: and I see
the motions of cowpaths . . .

Collected Poems 1951-1971

Tomaz Salamun

[from Tomaz Salamun's Four Questions of Melancholy: New and Selected Poems, 1996]

Photograph with a Quote from Yazoo:
Deep in Each Other’s Dream

Christ is my sex object, therefore I am
not an ethical problem. I lead him to the meadows.
Like a little shepherd, I force him to graze.

I root him out and clean his glands. Shall we
rinse ourselves under the tree? And when
we stretch out on the earth and watch the sky,

what moves? Will we have enough heat
for winter? Will we peel potatoes? Will
we make soldiers out of molten lead? Are we

going to the cows with our arms in their muzzles?
Will we bite the horsetail? Watch Mount Nanos.
We’ll hide in the moss, under sheets of glass.

When you took the picture of the tree, did you
take care of the explosion? What do you mean exactly?
The white milk traveling through the veins

into eternity, glazing the dark? I am a little stone
falling into your flesh. I made you twitch
and tied you up. We crucified you.

Four Questions of Melancholy: New & Selected Poems (Terra Incognita Series)

William Meredith

[from William Meredith's The Open Sea and Other Poems, 1958]

The Illiterate

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems

Edwin Arlington Robinson

[from Edwin Arlington Robinson's Dionysius in Doubt, 1925]

New England

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.

Passion here is a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

Seamus Heaney

[from Seamus Heaney's Electric Light, 2001]

Ballynahinch Lake

Godi, fanciullo mio; stato soave,
Stagion lieta e cotesta
     Leopardi, “Il Sabato del Villaggio’

         for Eamon Grennan

So we stopped and parked in the spring-cleaning light
Of Connemara on a Sunday morning
As a captivating brightness held and opened
And the utter mountain mirrored in the lake
Entered us like a wedge knocked sweetly home
Into core timber.
                         Not too far away
But far enough for their rumpus not to carry,
A pair of waterbirds splashed up and down
And on and on. Next thing their strong white flex
That could have been excitement or the death-throes
Turned into lift-off, big sure sweeps and dips
Above the water — no rafter skimming souls
Translating in and out of the house of life
But air-heavers, far heavier than the air.

Yet something in us had unhoused itself
At the sight of them, so that when she bent
To turn the key she only half-turned it
And spoke, as it were, directly to the windscreen,
In profile and in thought, the wheel at arm’s length,
Averring that this time, yes, it had indeed
Been useful to stop; then inclined her driver’s brow
Which shook a little as the ignition fired.

Electric Light: Poems

Les Murray

[from Les Murray's The Biplane Houses, 2006]

Ripe in the Arbours of the Nose

Even rippled with sun
the greens of a citrus grove darken
like ocean deepening from shore.
Each tree is full of shade.

A shadowy fast spiral through
and a crow's transfixed an orange
to carry off and mine
its latitudes and longitudes
till they're a parched void scrotum.

Al-Andalus has an orange grove
planted in rows and shaven above
to form an unwalkable dream lawn
viewed from loggias.
                               One level down,
radiance in a fruit-roofed ambulatory.

Mandarin, if I didn't eat you
how could you ever see the sun?
(Even I will never see it
except in blue translation).

Shedding its spiral pith helmet
an orange is an irrigation
of rupture and bouquet
rocking the lower head about;

one of the milder borders
of the just endurable
is the squint taste of a lemon,

and it was limes, of dark tooled green
which forgave the barefoot sailors
bringing citrus to new dry lands.

Cumquat, you bitter quip,
let a rat make jam of you
in her beardy house.

Blood oranges, children!
raspberry blood in the glass:
look for the five o'clock shadow
on their cheeks.
                        Those are full of blood,
and easy; only pick the ones that
relax off in your hand.

Below Hollywood, as everywhere
the trees of each grove appear
as fantastically open
treasure sacks, tied only at the ground.

The Biplane Houses: Poems

Carol Peters

chaparral

[Spanish, from chaparro, evergreen oak, from Basque txapar, diminutive of saphar, thicket]

a biome characterized by hot dry summers and cool moist winters and dominated by a dense growth of mostly small-leaved evergreen shrubs

a short-range low-altitude surface-to-air missile consisting of a turret mounted on a tracked vehicle carrying four ready-to-fire missiles

William Stafford

[William Stafford's first poem, from Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947, edited by Fred Marchant]

White Pigeons

What’s that —
The trumpet call, the haunting cry of aching land —
A wild goose passing?
From down what violet sky —
The looming winter night now edging frozen land —
Come circling home
White pigeons?

This is the aching land,
The bleak and desolate.
This is the plains.
On this blank loneliness in huddled clump
A house, a barn, and fences.
A boy, foreshortened, small, wind-buffeted,
His pigeons watched come home.
Hard sky, hard earth.
Soft pigeons.
Grateful pigeons, rustling, sleepy cluttering.
Soft
Soft pigeons.

What’s that —
The trumpet call, the haunting cry of aching land —
A wild goose passing?
From down what violet sky —
The looming winter night now edging frozen land —
Come circling home
White pigeons?

Lawrence, Kansas
Spring 1937

Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947

Kenyon Review's blog

An apple is what you do with it.

Laura Riding

[from Laura Riding's The Poems of Laura Riding, editor Mark Jacobs, 2001]

The Wind, The Clock, The We

The wind has at last got into the clock –
Every minute for itself.
There’s no more sixty,
There’s no more twelve,
It’s as late as it’s early.

The rain has washed out the numbers.
The trees don’t care what happens.
Time has become a landscape
Of suicidal leaves and stoic branches –
Unpainted as fast as painted.
Or perhaps that’s too much to say,
With the clock devouring itself
And the minutes given leave to die.

The sea’s no picture at all.
To sea, then: that’s time now,
And every mortal heart’s a sailor
Sworn to vengeance on the wind,
To hurl life back into the thin teeth
Out of which first it whistled,
An idiotic defiance of it knew not what
Screeching round the studying clock.

Now there’s neither ticking nor blowing.
The ship has gone down with its men,
The sea with the ship, the wind with the sea.
The wind at last got into the clock,
The clock at last got into the wind,
The world at last got out of myself.

At last we can make sense, you and I,
You lone survivors on paper,
The wind’s boldness and the clock’s care
Become a voiceless language,
And I the story hushed in it –
Is more to say of me?
Do I say more than self-choked falsity
Can repeat word for word after me,
The script not altered by a breath
Of perhaps meaning otherwise?

The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection, Revised Edition

William Carlos Williams

[from William Carlos Williams's Collected Poems: Volume II 1939-1962]

The Bitter World of Spring

On a wet pavement the white sky recedes
mottled black by the inverted
pillars of the red elms,
in perspective, that lift the tangled

net of their desires hard into
the falling rain. And brown smoke
is driven down, running like
water over the roof of the bridge-

keeper's cubicle. And, as usual,
the fight as to the nature of poetry
— Shall the philosophers capture it? —
is on. And, casting an eye

down into the water, there, announced
by the silence of a white
bush in flower, close
under the bridge, the shad ascend,

midway between the surface and the mud,
and you can see their bodies
red-finned in the dark
water headed, unrelenting, upstream.

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 2 Volume Set

Charles Simic

[from Charles Simic's Sixty Poems, 2007]

Factory

The machines were gone, and so were those who worked them.
A single high-backed chair stood like a throne
In all that empty space.
I was on the floor making myself comfortable
For a long night of little sleep and much thinking.

An empty birdcage hung from a steam pipe.
In it I kept an apple and a small paring knife.
I placed newspapers all around me on the floor
So I could jump at the slightest rustle.
It was like the scratching of a pen,
The silence of the night writing in its diary.

Of rats who came to pay me a visit
I had the highest opinion.
They’d stand on two feet
As if about to make a polite request
On a matter of great importance.

Many other strange things came to pass.
Once a naked woman climbed on the chair
To reach the apple in the cage.
I was on the floor watching her go on tiptoe,
Her hand fluttering in the cage like a bird.

On other days, the sun peeked through dusty windowpanes
To see what time it was. But there was no clock,
Only the knife in the cage, glinting like a mirror,
And the chair in the far corner
Where someone once sat facing the brick wall.

Sixty Poems

Muddy Prints, Water Shine

Buy Muddy Prints, Water Shine at Amazon.

Read Muddy Prints, Water Shine, here.

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Kilauea

Fresh lava creeps, wrinkling
through rockpiles and hapu fern,

past purple backs of hands,
tree frogs smaller than thumbs.

Long nights are fractured
with screaming.

Behind the healer's house
a yellow schoolbus, weed-festooned,

bumpered to a tanker-truck.
Pink plumes of cane drop seed

on stainless steel. She places
her hands on flesh's clamor —

one touch erases,
another creates.

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

The Scent of Skunk

gasp and sweetness
atmosphere a proof
of time passing

air displaced
by what bristles at
sprays

let the owl
swoop down
barred wings batter

what passes
gasp and sweetness
we breathe

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Along the Shore of Lake Pinewild

Fish fan in the man's shadow.
He squats and huffs

at the white geese
hissing.

The stone in his shoe
is evidence.

A gander paddlewheels
on jeweled legs.

[originally published in Realpoetik]

         -> next

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who came to my readings Thursday and Friday in Charleston.

I began both readings with an excerpt from A. R. Ammons's poem, "Identity," and I highly recommend that you read his poem "Nelly Myers" on pages 14-17 of this downloadable PDF file from Ohio State University.

Pattiann Rogers

[from Pattiann Rogers's Wayfare, 2008]

Portrait During the Creation of Sleep

Like the elm's shadow
disappearing at noon
into the trunk, branch,
and full leaf of its presence,
so Lila disappears in sleep,
becoming the fully bountiful
body of her body.

I say sleep is a place, the very
being of place, tangible,
alive. It is the suffocation
of the void from which breath
rises, the progenitor of sleep.

Lila closes her eyes, lays
her head on her pillow, moves
willingly, easily, as if to a lover,
toward the being of sleep.
She knows the way.

Like the power of the god
of absence, sleep transfigures
its creator.

No strumming wind, no surf,
no chitter or hum, no angelic
chorus — sleep, without sound
of itself, is the engendering
space of sound.

I say sleep is not faith
but all the atoms of faith
not yet united.

Lila lays her head
on the pillow, closes
the god of her eyes, lifts
like a shadow and disappears
into the full and boundless
forest of the sleep she sleeps.

Wayfare

A. R. Ammons

[excerpted from A. R. Ammons's "Identity" from Collected Poems: 1951:1971, 1972]

it is
wonderful
       how things work: I will tell you
                   about it
                   because

it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
       and stars and spider webs
and known
                   is loved:
             in that love,
             each of us knowing it,
             I love you

Collected Poems 1951-1971

Beth Ann Fennelly

[two sections from a 15-section poem from Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables, 2008]

Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle

6.

Free will is the question, to me & most.
How much can we fault our dead dads?
If I'd allow, the AA book
would say "disease," of rage unpurple me. Confess,
JB: willed you to be a night-mayor
of the flesh?

Can I lay blame — "'42: Marries Eileen . . . '47: First infidelity . . ."?
And if I can't, how praise my stallion solely
rutting apple-munching me?
Stabled. (Sugar-cube teeth beyond the fence
have I desired? Natch. But no touch-touch.)
(Not much.)

"Free Willie" is the question, a U.S. flick
about a whale I saw previewed in London,
where "willie" is slang for "dick."
Free Willie. Like whales the giggles breached.
Is accountability just that, some cosmic
inadvertent joke?


7.

Of your strict stanzas only nuns should speak,
& of your crumpled syntax only imbeciles
& armadillos, mystics,
children, & those who dream
of Calder mobiles piloted through wind tunnels
by angels on LSD.

In roadside Mexico a man macheted pineapple,
sprinkled it with salt & lime & hellborn chili dust.
It cost less than a buck.
Don't eat it, a fellow tourist warned, coming off the bus.
I ate it. So with your words
my lips sweetburn.

I get (ish) it. I pumped my swing at six
so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You
know, don't you,
what happened next — after the swing set's stiff legs
rocked thrice — but before I hit the ground —
I flew.

[for the entire poem, go to Blackbird, Fall 2007 Vol. 6 No. 2]

Unmentionables: Poems

Valerio Magrelli

[Valerio Magrelli translated by Dana Gioia from New European Poets edited by Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller, 2008]

I have often imagined that glances
survive the act of seeing
as if they were poles,
measuring rods, lances
thrown in a battle.
Then I think that in a room
one has just left
those same lines must stay behind
sometimes suspended there and criscrossed
untouched and overlaid like the wooden pieces
in a game of pickup sticks.

New European Poets

C. D. Wright

[from C. D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, 1998]

After the iridectomy
the slow recognition of forms

A shirt on the floor looked like
the mouth of a well

Spots on a horse
horrible holes in its side

The sun in the tree
green hill of crystals

Moon over Milledgeville
only a story

Saucer of light on the wall
the hand of god

. . .

Early every evening she sits on the steps of her trailer. The
dirt yard raked. Caterpillar fording the furrows. Mercy,
Louise. If it wasn't hot hot hot. Cornlight. Eyes drink the
color and are refreshed. Images seen but not interpreted.
Thanks to her lovely twin trees the water she drew was cool.
Cool the water she drank from the pump.

Deepstep Come Shining

Daniel Nathan Terry

[from Daniel Nathan Terry's Capturing the Dead, 2007]

Noah Williams

Harvest of Death
Negative by Timothy O'Sullivan
5 July 1863 Gettysburg

Spread-eagle on the field
of Gettysburg
the dead arch their backs

as if the ground they lie upon
won't forgive them
and wants them gone,

as if pulled
by ropes hooked
into their breastbones.

Their torsos swell
toward Heaven
as if the Lord

has only this
small mercy left.
Or is it as simple

as the grip of death
and decay:
muscles tensing

before finally letting go,
hollow bellies
full of vapor? Is it as natural

as the orchard in the valley —
these windfall men
ripened and ready

for the camera to commence
its thorough
and slow gathering?

A. R. Ammons

[from A. R. Ammons Collected Poems: 1951-1971, 1972]

Mechanism

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
          morality: any working order,
       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,
          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held
          to maintain the order in repair,
       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:
          honor the persisting reactor,
       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars
          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where
          flash vanishes into stillness,
       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed
          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
          unique genes,
       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,
          territorial rights, mind rising
       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:
          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
       efficiency — the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
             necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
         the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
             that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
         great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

Collected Poems 1951-1971

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

[from Laure-Anne Bosselaar's A New Hunger, 2007]

Friends,

this is the viscous heart I hide from you:
gnashing, polluted, hooked to my ribs
like a burr, stuck there and stinging,
and it's only 4:14 in the morning.

Those sudden shudders my waking alarm,
then the daily discipline of shutting away that heart,
shambling through the house, touching things,
stroking their shapes as if it could help me

not be the Bad Sower's daughter each morning:
the pit from a seed he sowed and left to parch,
and no crows would feed on it. So I lived. I don't
want to explain this further, I'm done with it.

But this for you: on the days I hold your books,
read your letters, recall a gaze, the delicate
dangle of an earring, or the throwing
back of a head in laughter,

it's you seeding the first beat into the heart
I open. And as the sun heaves daylight
into the parched tree by my window,
and rats burrow away, when pigeons come

down to feed on dust and pizza crusts, I thrum
the lit syllables of your names on my sill with all
ten fingers, typing them firmly into the brick,
and counting their beats, counting their beats.

A New Hunger

Steve Gehrke

[from Steve Gehrke's Michelangelo's Seizure", 2007]

Renoir, Arthritic

He's up early, considering the body,
its wetness, the bladder
like a puffer fish, the bowels
swallowing and swallowing,
mucus, come, blood, the soft crab
of the heart, darkly breathing,
the lungs spread out in the chest
like wings of a manta-ray,
not to mention the rich coral
of brain, the whole body
a trapped sea, netted in the skin,
perception itself just the motion
of the waves, the boat-wake
of experience healing into memory,
so that lying there, waiting to ring
the tiny silver bell that brings the nurse,
he feels his arthritis like a drought
inside of him, knowing the curative waters
at Bourbonne are no good, no good
the medicinal drip, his hand bruised
this morning where the brush was
strapped to it, though perhaps a bit of cloth
might be used between his fingers
and the wood, so that he can
continue to paint, to become
his rose-filled models, to feel
the elasticity of them, their fluidity
even in the hard desert-turtle
of his hand, so that he can continue
staring through the three-pronged
compass of the easel, until he gives
the signal and the canvas is raised
before him, like a sail, and he begins
to work, leaning forward, squinting,
drifting toward the horizon that he makes.

Michelangelo's Seizure (National Poetry Series)

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's Leviathan with a Hook, 2002]

Divine, Dredge

Severe the light, and in the ether
rough weather settles.
Ramshackle, headstrong valley,
headlands bare of tree, tired starts
of olive branching along the foothills.
Cisterns breached, water stands
in the path, taking on rust, a smell of turpentine,
red leaves moored against the shallows.

A quiver -- a red lizard on a rock:
I catch him, halve him with a knife.

Two slippery sagittal lizards, veins
interrupted, spilling into my hands,
second skin starting to buckle.
I thumb an edge, pull back
the scales . . . another pale lizard,
soft flesh, lidless eye
reflecting my abject, adjectival, earthbound, blessed body.

Leviathan With a Hook: Poems

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's Leviathan with a Hook, 2002]

Cold Front

At sunset, virga turns orange,
a fire infolding itself, its downwardness
sucked in, turned skyward and dense
in the cold atmosphere. Gold fire
on the wet fields, fire on the hemisphere.

The maple upturns porous leaves, barometric.
At the river, reeds rattle together, daylilies
yielding their petals to night.
Clearance lights necklace the hilltop in rubies.

In the thickening air, little firefly, light.
Lightning will shutter past midnight, and you
as in discourse, unshutter your small, candent
body, greening my eye-green.

Tomorrow morning morning's minstrel
will raise its brazen jackdaw cry,
bullfrogs shrieking at the river,
cattails bumping a clapboard symphony.

Leviathan With a Hook: Poems

the pope

on drugs

[AP] Pope Condemns Contraception, Warns Sex Can Be a 'Drug'

Rachel Zucker

on drugs

reasons to live

walkway

Federico Garcia Lorca

[from Federico Garcia Lorca's Collected Poems, 2002; translated by Catherine Brown]

VIII
Ghazal of Dark Death

I want to sleep the sleep of apples,
far away from the uproar of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.

I don't want to hear that the dead lose no blood,
that the decomposed mouth is still begging for water.
I don't want to find out about grass-given martyrdoms,
or the snake-mouthed moon that works before dawn.

I want to sleep just a moment,
a moment, a minute, a century.
But let it be known that I have not died:
that there is a stable of gold in my lips,
that I am the West Wind's little friend,
that I am the enormous shadow of my tears.

Wrap me at dawn in a veil,
for she will hurl fistfuls of ants;
sprinkle my shoes with hard water
so her scorpion's sting will slide off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of apples
and learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;
because I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.

The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Revised)